Authors: Alistair Horne
Guderian’s vehement exposition of the true state of the French collapse on his front (backed up by similar views expressed by the other Panzer corps commander, Reinhardt) seems to have persuaded List and, through him, to have at least partially reassured Rundstedt. But not Hitler. Finally, List, with Rundstedt’s approval, produced an admirable compromise. He ordered Guderian:
Reconnaissance in force to be carried out. Corps headquarters must in all circumstances remain where it is, so that it may be easily reached.
Thus, while giving Guderian enough latitude to stifle his petulance, Rundstedt must have thought that, by immobilizing Guderian – as he would never lead his Panzers ‘from the rear’ – he would have effectively halted the advance. But he did not know Guderian; meanwhile, through what appears to have
been connivance at junior levels between the O.K.H. staff and Rundstedt’s, ‘reconnaissance in force’ was formally defined as being inclusive of all but the rear echelons!
Guderian’s ‘Blind Eye’
A delighted Guderian was now provided with exactly the blind eye he required. Obediently, his corps H.Q. remained at Soize, but
a wire was laid from there to my advanced headquarters, so that I need not communicate with my staff by wireless and my orders could not therefore be monitored by the wireless intercept units of the O.K.H. and the O.K.W.
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The ‘reconnaissance in force’ was set in motion. After the best part of a day’s inaction, by the evening of the 17th the Panzers were rolling forward again, unbeknown to Hitler and the High Command. It was a splendid piece of inspired military insubordination.
Among the Panzer troops themselves, however, there was no doubt that the halt order of the 17th was regarded as an unmitigated blessing. It was, points out Kielmansegg, ‘the first real day of rest since the beginning of the campaign’. As well as enabling the outdistanced infantry and supplies to catch up, here at last was an opportunity to get some badly needed sleep, to grease up the tanks and replace their numerous worn-out parts. But if there had been no such ruthless and self-assured commander as Guderian to keep the advance rolling, if Rundstedt had had subordinates sharing his anxieties on the 15th and 16th, could events have taken a less unhappy turn for the French? Colonel Goutard, the French military historian, is one who thinks that such a two-day respite ‘might perhaps have given our Command time to collect itself’.
De Gaulle: ‘The Chance to Act’
17 May, the day the Panzers halted, was also the day appointed by Georges for the first co-ordinated attacks on the
‘Bulge’ from north and south. But in fact it was solely de Gaulle’s group that made any concerted effort. Then aged forty-nine – exactly a year older than his fellow Scorpion, Rommel – and still a full colonel, this haughty, totally dedicated figure, who had chosen to return to his tanks rather than accept a political appointment as Secretary to Reynaud’s War Cabinet, had only received command of the 4th Armoured Division on 11 May. As de Gaulle himself remarks, the division ‘indeed did not exist’, and its various elements were only gradually arriving from distant points. On the 15th, de Gaulle was summoned to Georges’s H.Q. and informed that General Touchon was endeavouring to establish a defensive front barring the way to Paris; operating from the Laon area, the 4th Armoured was to ‘gain time’ for Touchon, and it was left to de Gaulle to decide how. General Georges, ‘calm, cordial but visibly overwhelmed’, sent him on his way with the words:
There, de Gaulle! For you who have so long held the ideas which the enemy is putting into practice, here is the chance to act.
De Gaulle hastened to Laon, where the next day he was joined by an embryo staff and the scattered remnants of General Petiet’s 3rd Cavalry. A dismal spectacle greeted him:
Miserable processions of refugees crowded along all the roads from the north. I saw, also, a good many soldiers who had lost their weapons. They belonged to the troops routed by the Panzers during the preceding days. Caught up, as they fled, by the enemy’s mechanized detachments, they had been ordered to throw away their arms and make off to the south so as not to clutter up the roads. ‘We haven’t time,’ they had been told, ‘to take you prisoner!’
At the sight of this routed rabble and ‘at the tale, too, of that contemptuous piece of insolence of the enemy’s’, de Gaulle declares in his war memoirs,
I felt myself borne up by a limitless fury. ‘Ah! It’s too stupid! The war is beginning as badly as it could. Therefore it must go on. For this, the world is wide. If I live, I will fight, wherever I must, as long as I must, until the enemy is defeated and the national stain washed clean.’ All I have managed to do since was resolved upon that day.
Having carried out a reconnaissance, de Gaulle decided he would try to sever Guderian’s communications by striking for the important road junction at Montcornet, some twenty miles north-east of where his group was assembling. He would attack the next morning ‘with whatever forces might have reached me’. By dawn on the 17th, he had received just three battalions of tanks. Two of these consisted of light Renault R-35s, mounting the obsolete short-range 37-mm. gun; only one (the 46th) was a ‘B’ tank battalion, and this had but recently been converted from light tanks. It had never taken part in tactical manoeuvres, and had had only one firing practice with the 75-mm. gun. There was also one company of modern D-2 light (16 ton) tanks, equipped with the powerful 47-mm. gun. In the course of the day one solitary infantry battalion, the 4th Chasseurs, would arrive, transported in buses that were highly vulnerable from the air. In sharp contrast to Guderian’s lavish equipment, de Gaulle’s 4th Armoured had no proper anti-aircraft weaponry, nor could it call upon any air support worth the name.
Nevertheless, at daybreak de Gaulle set forth on his mission, through the ‘sad columns’ of Army fugitives, clad in a leather jacket and puffing incessantly at a cigarette, an exactting leader of his improvised division. Amid the harsh setting of mechanized warfare, there is a certain note of romance as its two great French and German protagonists, de Gaulle and Guderian, confront each other on the field of battle for the first time. The day began well for de Gaulle, with his tanks sweeping all before them up the road from Laon to Montcornet. Advancing through Dizy, Captain Idée, commanding the independent company of ‘D’ tanks, observed with pride the professional way in which his fourteen tanks were deploying themselves, but was concerned to see only two of the battalion of ‘B’ tanks which should have been on his right. At Chivres, Idée’s tanks overran a German reconnaissance column amid scenes of frightful carnage:
Hell breaks loose. There are their motor-cycles, their passengers inert, crumpled up in the side-cars or slumped over the handlebars; a truck in flames; an armoured car knocked out by our 47s; infantrymen mown down while they were withdrawing behind a farm; yet another armoured car, shot up on the road to Machecourt. Chivres is cleaned up, we continue towards Bucy. A feeling of success.
Another German column of soft vehicles was overtaken and left ‘a long line of fire’, and at 1500 hours de Gaulle’s tanks fought their way into Montcornet, ‘destroying everything which had had no time to flee’.
De Gaulle’s Attack: the German View
Here the command post of the 1st Panzer came close to being overrun that day. General Kirchner had himself become a casualty two days earlier when a vehicle had run over his knee as he lay catching up on a few minutes of badly needed sleep. Since then, he had lain immobilized, ‘cursing and with a menacing expression, on a stretcher near the situation map’, but refusing to relinquish command and relying heavily on his two staff officers, Wenck and Kielmansegg. Leaving his command post at Lislet just outside Montcornet, Kielmansegg was driving alone to the division’s advanced H.Q., some eight miles to the west:
As I came out of Montcornet and continued along the main road – the division’s only route – I saw several German soldiers running back towards me. They were engineers, who insisted that French tanks were coming behind them. I was disinclined to believe it, because the direction in which they pointed lay towards our own front! My ordnance officer, however, who had meanwhile hastily driven up a hill, confirmed it. There was no longer any time to consider where the tanks were coming from. I ordered the engineers, who had already laid some mines, to set up a barricade at the entry to Montcornet.
The town was filled with all kinds of vehicles, including Kielmansegg’s own ammunition columns, which were piling up on top of each other. Having established an
ad hoc
defence,
Kielmansegg rushed at full speed back to Lislet, which was left completely open to the French tanks. Here he found ‘lying blissfully and peacefully ignorant in the warm sunshine, a field service ammunition column halted in two of the roads leading to the village, and waiting to push on ahead’. Kielmansegg shouted at them to turn about. While they were reversing, the
Feldwebel
he had posted as a look-out ran up:
‘They’re coming,
Herr Hauptmann
, they’re coming!’ Soon I too heard shooting. At the same moment it occurred to me that among the other orders I had forgotten to inform my runner and clerk, who were in accommodations somewhere further off… then, the last one to leave, I pulled out of the still very quiet Lislet, as the first French tanks swung round into the village streets. Under these circumstances prudence was the better part of valour, for even with the best will in the world, one cannot hold up a dozen enemy tanks with a pistol.
Kielmansegg then hastened back to warn Guderian’s H.Q. at Soize. On his way, he met a few German tanks coming out of workshops. These he immediately ordered to head for the oncoming French; meanwhile some flak guns also opened up fire from the heights behind Lislet. Several of de Gaulle’s tanks were knocked out and the remainder beaten back, but Kielmansegg notes that about twenty-five had actually got in behind the 1st Panzer’s fighting troops. Among the German casualties was Kielmansegg’s fellow staff officer, Major Wenck, wounded on his way back from attending the sulphurous meeting that morning between Guderian and Kleist. On returning to Lislet, Kielmansegg found it ‘burning from one end to another, two shot-up French tanks stood in the village itself and several others lay before Montcornet and Lislet. My H.Q. was somewhat battered.’ Later in the afternoon there was a second tank attack, this time led by four heavy ‘B’ tanks. But
In spite of the fact that my light flak guns (which I had brought up in the interim) could not penetrate their thick armour, by firing at the tracks of the French machines they forced them to turn about. Here [claims Kielmansegg], the lack of fighting spirit of the enemy became abundantly clear to us; German tanks against so weak a defence would certainly not have turned round.
Captain Idée’s account of the close of the day’s operation strikes a depressingly familiar note:
1900 hours. Petrol is running low. The ‘B’ tanks have just turned about. They are leaving Lislet. The infantry had not been able to follow them, and what can we do without them? There must be some infiltration at our rear. The enemy platoon commanders have a terribly enterprising air about them.
His company of ‘D’ tanks then withdrew, though he noted proudly that he had lost only one machine in the fighting. Meanwhile, another column of de Gaulle’s tanks had been stopped dead on the River Serre and forced to retreat from Montcornet by German self-propelled guns firing across the river, which de Gaulle with his lack of artillery was unable to engage. On its way back to its starting-point, the 4th Armoured, unprotected by any air cover and desperately short of anti-aircraft guns, was attacked remorselessly by waves of Stukas. Captain Idée recalls the incendiary bullets ricocheting by the thousand off his armour as he thought grimly: ‘We shall not get out of this. I am blinded by sweat. I wipe myself with my sleeve – and the medallion of Ste Thérèse which I carry on my wrist smiles at me. I kiss it.’ Idée survived, though he lost one more tank from the air attacks. Now the alerted German armour began skirmishing in the rear of de Gaulle’s force.
We were lost children twenty miles in advance of the Aisne [says de Gaulle], wc had to put an end to a situation that was, to say the least, risky.
What did de Gaulle Achieve?
Thus ended de Gaulle’s first action, within the same twenty-four hours that it had begun. Two days later he would attack again, this time due northwards from Laon, and with further reinforcements, but with no greater success. In view of the
fame which his armoured operations of 1940 were later to receive at the hands of the Gaullist
mythomanes
, thereby creating the second of the four pillars on which his historical reputation rests,
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it may be useful to analyse briefly here just what was achieved at Montcornet on 17 May. De Gaulle himself states that his attack had left ‘several hundred German dead and plenty of burned-out lorries on the field. We had taken 130 prisoners. We had lost less than two hundred men.’
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But again unsupported by any infantry follow-up and with no backing on either flank, it could hardly be described as anything more than an armoured raid of ephemeral consequence. It is doubtful whether it gained any breathing-space for Touchon’s covering force to establish itself, and it certainly did not, as some Gaullist historians would claim, bring Guderian’s advance to a halt. (As has already been seen, an entirely different explanation lies behind the German halt on the 17th.) From Kielmansegg’s account, it is clear that the surprise of de Gaulle’s attack did create some momentary alarm within the 1st Panzer, but the German archives disclose none of the note of real concern to be found in the reports on the earlier defensive battles around Stonne, or the still greater anxiety which was to be evoked by the British counter-attack at Arras on 21–22 May. After the war, Kleist stated revealingly to Liddell Hart: